Welcome to my fashion brain as it is at the moment, particularly the first and last images. This spread is everything I love about late Sixties/early Seventies style, and more. No change is permanent, I still wake up in a different mood each day, but for the most part I am feeling the need to cover up, tune out and drift around…
“Take the whirl of lace petticoats and the swirl of countrified prints. Add gypsy flowers, baubles, bangles and beads. Find yourself a long, lazy spring afternoon, relax – and think nothing but beautiful…”

Photographed by John Carter. Scanned by Miss Peelpants from Petticoat, March 1970

Barbara wears halter top and pleated skirt by Mary Quant, £23 for the rigout, and shoes by Chelsea Cobbler. He wears intarsia sweater by Ballantyne.

Nice girls are turning a cold shoulder on some of the best looking men around. Perfectly enchanting girls, like Twiggy, who flashes her famous shoulder blades at Christopher Gable through her sleeveless, backless The Boy Friend costumes. And who can forget Lauren Bacall and lngrid Bergman acting with their backs turned on Bogie in all those Late Late Show films. Now you can make some of the best exit lines in the backless—and fairly frontless—cIothes previewed here. lt’s clear that fashion is on the side of the female female in clothes that show off a nice warm back and allow plenty of MANoeuvring room. Putting the Back-to-Basics through their paces in many of the pictures are Barbara Trentham and Gary Myers, a couple of Cosmo people to watch. Blonde, brainy Barbara with the 1,000-watt smile will soon be seen in her first film, opposite Shirley MacLaine. called, if you can believe it, The Possession of Joel Delaney, and Aussie Gary is tall, dark and one of television’s busiest tough guys. Together they show that a cold shoulder never turned a good man off…

Scanned from the very first UK edition of Cosmopolitan, March 1972. Photographs by Norman Eales.

One of my favourite images from a Vargas-inspired spread in Nova, photographed by Hans Feurer. I will scan the others in time, but they all deserve solo appreciation. I think I would actually give my firstborn for those Chelsea Cobbler shoes. Red leather AND stars? Fetch my smelling salts!

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again, there is something about the Seventies take on Forties style (and particularly pin-ups) which I find infinitely more appealing than the originals or the tired current trend for such things.

It takes all the glamour and sauce, but gives it that subversive, pop art-esque treatment so typical of designers like Tommy Roberts, Terry de Havilland and Rae Spencer-Cullen for Miss Mouse (amongst so many other Vintage-a-Peel favourites). The models look quirky, confident and very knowing; I never get a sense of exploitation or submission. Even the tagline ‘exploitation can be fun’ is perfectly pitched and mocking both the exploiters and the prudes. Viva la Seventies!